Monday, September 18, 2006

In the morning before waking, pleasure is at its height when the phone rings downstairs. There is a solution to great problems, too important to relinquish. I might be onto the reason for amyloid plaques forming in the brain, which it turns out has something to do with the neglect of beauty. The phone rings again but the duvet offers its most sybaritic, enveloping softness, warmth without heat, holding me up instead of lying flat under me. There is none of the bruising pressure that is sometimes there. Proof of how amyloid plaque derives from the neglect of beauty is only a couple of mathematically elegant expressions away. But the phone that's connected to another planet rings again.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

A breezy afternoon, the sun still partly overhead on its journey from the street outside to the back gardens. The trees still hold their shadows below, rustling with all their leaves. Fruit is strewn everywhere, from street trees and garden trees that overhang fences red apples, plums, cherries. There are more black elder and orange firethorn berries than the wood pigeons can eat. Birdshit falls purple on a car windscreen. The west facing high walls are at their brightest, dazzling white and creamy pastel. The warbling of conversations, words indistinguishable, with folk rhythms and jags of mirth. Something that sounds like a basketball bouncing always when you listen, but never seen. Traffic whines far off. The high wild pear tree shivers like tambourines jostled by the breeze, its sway and reach more passionate and appealing than a dance. Some small engine drones in a garden on the next street. The sky is ice-blue. Telegraph wires shimmy not very much, bounced by the breeze. All the talk in them weighs nothing. If you could take all the talk from all the wires in the world and put it on one side of a scales, it would be outweighed by an empty chestnut shell.